Sunday, January 29, 2017

For Clay Jannon, any job is better than no job
at all. And while no one working in a
bookstore ever gets rich quick, it is kind of a neat place to pass the time.

The hours suck though. Mr.
Penumbra’s bookstore is open 24 hours a day, and Clay is unfortunate enough to
draw the midnight to 8:00 AM shift. OTOH,
how many customers are going to wander in at three in the morning?

However,
the few nocturnal patrons that do show up are a curious bunch. First, they treat the bookstore like a
library: they “borrow” some very obscure books, and it’s always with utmost
urgency. Second, they all seem to borrow
the same few books. It’s almost like
they know each other. And third, if you
peek inside those books, they’re all in gobbledygook. No words, just random letters.

Hey, maybe Clay Jannon has stumbled onto a den of spies ending each other coded messages via those books! After all, Mr. Penumbra told him not to look inside
the tomes. Or maybe they’re a bunch of
nut cases, who are under the delusion they’re reading words from random letters. In any case, it’s worth investigating
further.

But prudently, Clay. After all, we can’t
afford to lose this job now, can we?

What’s To Like...

Mr. Penumbra’s
24-Hour Bookstore is a phenomenally popular bestseller. It's garnered more than 2,000 reviews at
Amazon, and is one of their Top 10,000 sellers, despite being almost 3½ years
old. The Goodreads stats are even more
insane – over 19,000 reviews and more than 118,000 ratings. That’s a lot of readers & buyers of this book.

The
settings are a bibliophile’s delight.
Most of the story takes place in two bookstores/libraries. The plotline is heavy on the intrigue and light
on the action. This usually makes for a
dull read, but Robin Sloan’s writing style is engaging, and the characters he
creates are richly 3-D. This may be an
easy read, but it’s also a fun read.

It helps if, like me, you’re a techno-geek. There are numerous plugs for geeky things,
such as XKCD, Wall.E, Google, Kindles (and
other forms of e-readers), Jackson Pollock, the blue screen of death, and Visicalc. Jeez, I haven’t thought of that last one in
decades, and once upon a time it was the cat’s meow of spreadsheets.

You’ll
also learn a lot about a fascinating man named Aldus Manutius, who is real (wiki him; I can’t
believe I’ve never heard of this guy), and the Gerritszoon font,
which is not. My Gnostics get a brief
mention, that’s always a plus. Other neat
things : Matropolis, GrumbleGear, the Waybacklist, Singularity Singles (speed dating
for nerds), and OK/TK.

The
book was shorter than I expected, and is told from a first-person POV (Clay’s). This is a standalone novel, with ANAICT no
sequel, although there is a 60-page prequel, giving Mr. Penumbra’s backstory,
for $2.99,
which seems steep to me, but I suppose is to be expected for a novella by a top-tier author. This is
why I don’t read Amazon singles.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Colophon(n.)
: a publisher’s emblem or imprint,
especially one on the title page or spine of a book,

Others : Proscenium(n.)

Excerpts...

“I did not know
people your age still read books,” Penumbra says. He raises an eyebrow. “I was under the impression they read
everything on their mobile phones.”

“Not
everyone. There are plenty of people
who, you know– people who still like the smell of books.”

“The smell!”
Penumbra repeats. “You know you are
finished when people start talking about the smell!” He smiles at that – then something occurs to
him, and he narrows his eyes. “I do not
suppose you have a … Kindle?”(loc. 873)

Kat gushes about
Google’s projects, all revealed to her now.
They are making a 3-D web browser.
They are making a car that drives itself. They are making a sushi search engine – here
she pokes a chopstick down at our dinner – to help people find fish that is
sustainable and mercury-free. They are
building a time machine. They are
developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris. (loc. 2898)

The
writing is superb, the character-development is top-notch, and I’m not the type
that needs someone to die in a book that I’m reading. So why not a higher rating? Well, if you brush aside all the good stuff,
you discover that the storyline itself is hit-and-miss.

Clay “breaks” the initial code by discovering that the patrons make a
strange pattern if you plot their comings and goings in the bookstore in 3-D. However, you subsequently find
that it’s pretty …erm… meaningless. Mr.
Penumbra and his cohorts are waiting for something, and whether it’s God, Godot,
or something else is a fascinating enigma.
But the ending falls flat.

There’s
a rather nice epilogue to the story, about the various characters and what
happens to them, but honestly, I thought it would’ve been more powerful if those details were fleshed out and incorporated as part of the ending itself.

But
the plusses outweigh the minuses, and I’m always partial to a story that makes
you wonder through most of the book whether the cause of the oddities are
natural or supernatural phenomena.

7½ Stars.
Subtract 1 star
if you find any book without at least a couple thrills and spills to be
somewhat of a tedious read.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Things couldn’t get any worse. One of Gideon’s fellow nuclear scientists
goes crazy, taking a family hostage in New York City, and Gideon, who’s in the
city at the time, is asked to assist in the stand-off negotiations.

Alas,
the coworker is delusional, claiming that he’s been a test rat subjected to all
sorts of radiation experiments, perpetrated by all sorts of evil people, and
that Gideon is in cahoots with them.
There’s only one way this hostage situation can resolve itself.

But
the investigation in the aftermath reveals that radiation did indeed play a
part in the ordeal. A plume of it hovers
above a nearby warehouse. There’s
evidence of a nuclear bomb having been made there, and apparently the
hostage-taker actually suffered a massive exposure to the radiation during its
construction. Serves him right, since he
just recently converted to Islam, and was undoubtedly a jihadist.

Ah,
but the bomb and the other baddies are gone, and it seems they are intent on
detonating it 10 days from now, somewhere in the United States.

Well,
I guess things can get worse after all.

What’s To Like...

The action starts immediately, and the thrills
and spills run rampant throughout the final page. The chapters are short, so there’s always a
good point to stop. The settings are
comfortable, and, for me at least, familiar: New York City, New Mexico, and Washington DC. Gideon’s somewhat reluctant partner, Special
FBI Agent Stone Fordyce, is kinda kewl.

If
you liked the first book in this series (reviewed here), then you’ll be
equally happy with Gideon’s Corpse. Ditto if you’re a Dirk Pitt fan; I still get the
impression that Preston and Child are trying to horn in on the Clive Cussler
reading market with this series. It
should be noted that the book’s title has no relevance to the storyline that I could fathom.

There’s
lots of cussing in the book, and a couple of sex scenes. Every woman that crosses Gideon’s path seems to eventually end up in the sack with him.
Fortunately, there’s only one female lead here, and her relationship
with Gideon would be listed as “complicated” if she were on Facebook.

Gideon’s Corpse is a fast, easy read.
Most of the characters are paper-thin, ideal for reading on an airplane
or at the beach. It has a standalone
storyline, which I always like when reading a series. Finally, I liked the crowd-control tactic on
page 27, called “kettling”. I first ran
across this term just a few books ago.

Kewlest New Word ...

Raddled(adj.)
: showing signs of age or fatigue. (curiously,
there’s no root verb “raddle” for this meaning; it only exists in the past tense as a
modifier).

Others : Desuetude(n.); Dissembling (v.)

Excerpts...

“Didn’t it seem
strange to you that he converted to Islam?”

“Not at all. When we were married, he used to drag me to
the Zen center for meditations, to the pseudo-Indian Native American Church
meetings, EST, Scientology, the Moonies – you name it, he tried it.”

“So he was sort
of a spiritual seeker.”

“That’s a nice way
of putting it. He was a pain in the
ass.” (pg. 147)

(H)e had to do
something about the man downstairs.

He watched the
man for a while. The man didn’t look
sleepy, he wasn’t drinking, and – what unnerved Gideon most of all – he was
reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. This man was no dumb hick cowboy. The outfit was all show. This was a sophisticated and intelligent
person who would not be easily fooled. (pg.
290)

I’m
a big fan of Preston & Child’s Agent Pendergast books, but I have to say
that Gideon Crew is shallow and over-the-top compared to Aloysius. He’s never wrong, has amazing talents (here,
his previously unrevealed background in fencing comes in handy), and has a nerdy
machismo that continues to make any and all females drool.

But the main problem I have with the series are the WTF’s.

Gideon just happens to be in New York City when a coworker from New
Mexico goes postal just a short distance away. What are the odds? In one of the many chase scenes, a hand car in an abandoned mine just
luckily has some blasting caps in it.
The baddies sabotage an small airplane that Fordyce and Gideon are
flying in, both engines flame out, and yet both agents are able to walk away from
the landing. Curiously, they don't think to go back and find the saboteur, they just continue on their merry way. When it's Gideon with a
pistol shooting it out with a team of spec ops guys in a helicopter with fully
automatic weapons, who do you think wins? Yep,
you guessed it.

6 Stars. Gideon’s Corpse is a better read than Gideon’s Sword, but just barely. If Gideon Crew ever teamed up with Dirk Pitt,
they could probably exterminate all of the evil-doers in the world.

The
forces of Evil: The Yull, the Lemming Men, the ant-like Ghasts, and the
religiously-loco Edenites have joined forces, albeit uneasily, to conquer the
galaxy and rid it of all that is good, including the British Space Empire and
its tea.

The
good guys can use all the help they can get, even from the incredibly advanced, but
creepily non-corporeal Vorl. They’ve
arranged a peace conference to attempt to sway the Vorl to their side, and the
number one fear is an incursion by the bad guys, especially since it seems that
one of the baddies has developed a lethal spaceship with a super-effective cloaking
device. And said warship just mauled a
convoy of space freighters that was being protected by our hero, Captain
Isambard Smith.

Hey, Smith. How’d you like to get
another crack at that cloaked-up dreadnaught?

Yes, we thought so.

What’s To Like...

After
a four-year hiatus following Book 3 (reviewed here), reportedly to successfully
pursue a law degree, Toby Frost comes back with another solid addition to the Space Captain Smith series. All of Smith’s crew are here, including the
M’Lak headhunter Suruk, the android pilot Polly Carveth, the 25th-century
flower-child Rhianna, and my favorite MacGuffin, Gerald the hamster. Ditto for everyone from the British spy cadre
– Major Wainscott, “W”, Susan, and bounty hunter extraordinaire Rick Dreckitt.

Frost also introduces us to a bunch of
new characters, among them Captain Felicity Fitzroy (look out, Rhianna!) and the
mysterious and charismatic Le Fantome.
Quite a few new peeps are thrown at the reader at the start of the book,
but I think that’s a plus in that it shows that the author isn’t just rehashing
past tales.

There are three main plotlines.
Smith chases the cloaked warship; Wainscott protects the peace conference,
and the baddies make plans to disrupt it.
Everything converges seamlessly. The
Ghasts are back, but they play a lesser role here, which I thought was a good
move. It’s always kewl to do battle with
new Black Hats.

A Game of Battleships is written in English, as
opposed to “American”, and that always makes for entertaining reading. There’s a slew of puns, and plays-on-words,
which is the main reason I love this series.
A bunch of these involved the French language (“someone regretting Ryan”), which
was an added treat. I also liked the
various tips-of-the-hat, including ones to Kraftwerk, Asterix, and
Dave-&-Hal, they of 2001: A Space Odyssey
fame.

There
really aren’t any slow spots, which is a Toby Frost trademark. A Game
of Battleships is a standalone novel, as well Book 4 of what appears to be
a 5-volume series. See Kindle Details, below.

Kewlest New Word...

Nobble(v.)
: to obtain dishonestly; to steal. (informal, a
Britishism)

“Alright then. Basically, I’d say we’ve passed the stage of
being merely inconvenienced and are now moving into the realm of being totally
buggered. Should the buggeration
continue, I’m anticipating us losing not just paddle but canoe very shortly,
leaving us floundering helplessly in the filthy rapids of a certain malodorous
creek.”(loc. 397)

“Many years ago,
when I was a mere spawn, impressionable and technically incapable of criminal
responsibility, the elders of my tribe told me of a land beyond the great
waterfall that plummets over the cliffs of Bront. He who recited the correct charm and then
leaped through the waters, would emerge in a land of wonders. So I travelled for nine days, until the
waters were in sight.

Speaking the
charm, I sprang through the waterfall.”

”What did you
see?”

“Stars,
Mazuran. I knocked myself out on the
cliff. The elders were lying through
their mandibles.” (loc.
2826)

Kindle Details...

A
Game of Battleships sells for $4.99 at Amazon. The other four books in the series go for $4.99-$7.99. The latest book in the series, End of Empires, was published in 2014. I suspect it is the series’ finale. Toby Frost issued Straken,
the first e-book in a new series called Astra
Militarum in 2016, and co-wrote a second book, titled eponymously, in
that series last year as well. But they
are both only available for the Kindle at Amazon-UK,
and neither has garnered any reviews yet.
Straken is available at Amazon
as a paperback, but it goes for $16.00. There are no reviews for that version either.

“Do you know Beethoven’s Ninth?”
“Really? At what?” (loc. 777)

The
ending was good, but not great. It had
an interesting twist to it, but I felt like I’d seen it used before in other
stories, and it seemed a somewhat awkward fit here.

The
big problem with A Game of Battleships is the formatting. Typos abound, especially of two types:
possessives and words with double L’s. I
tend to blame the publisher, Myrmidon Books, not the author for this. Since my library carries the first three
books in this series, I presume Toby Frost did not self-publish this.

One typo that deserves special mention was the word “teachest”.
This should of course be two words: “tea chest” (but maybe it’s a single word in “British-speak”?),
yet my mind kept trying to make it the superlative form of the word “teach”. Talk about a brain freeze.

It
reminded me of a book I read years ago, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (reviewed
here), which contained the presumably
validword “mambaskin”. Which means the skin of a certain snake. But my brain kept trying to make it “mam
baskin”, evidently a weird flavor at our local ice cream parlor. Needless to say, this also resulted in a
brain fart.

7½ Stars. If you liked the first three books in the
series, you’ll not be disappointed in this one.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Alas, Elantris!
Once upon a time, it was truly a golden city. Magic flowed freely within its limits, and
among all of its citizens, who were held to be gods, and revered for their healing touch. If you lived elsewhere, and were very
fortunate, the Shaod (the “Transformation”) would fall upon you and
you’d be instantly transported to Elantris to live a new and glorious life as one of them.

But something happened ten years ago. The Shaod no longer exists. Now, if you are very unfortunate, the Reod (“the
Punishment”) will fall upon you and you’ll be banished to live
within the black, grimy , death-filled gates of Elantris. There is no cure for the Reod, nor
any protection against it. It strikes
instantly, without warning, and without distinction. Anyone might wake up one morning with hair
falling out, and black splotches covering his or her skin.

Even a royal prince.

What’s To Like...

There are three main characters in Elantris: Prince Raoden of Arelon, Princess Sarene
of Teod, and the Derethi high priest Hrathen.
For most of the book, the chapters rotate among the POV’s of this trio, and each has a different “slant”.
The Raoden chapters are mostly Action-oriented. The Sarene chapters focus on courtly
Intrigue. The Hrathen chapters give some
keen insight on the squabblings of Religion.
All three are expertly penned, and the varying themes keep the storytelling from bogging down.

There
are a slew of supporting characters, all phenomenally developed; and a bunch of
secondary storylines to keep you on your toes.
I found the theological debates between Hrathen and Sarene fascinating;
and Harthen’s protégé, Dilaf, is a kewl study of “zealous evangelism”. There is also a lot of wit and humor, such as
Sarene’s (lack
of)artistic talent.

I
liked the magic system, which is centered around glyph-like “Aons”, and which
reminded me of my Mandarin Chinese classes from years ago. Stroke order and perfect sizing of the glyphs
are important, and there’s a handy glossary in the back of the book, giving a bunch of the
basic Aon patterns.

The
world-building is somewhat limited, considering this is a 600-page Epic Fantasy opus. For most of the story, our protagonists are
confined to the titular city of Elantris, and its adjoining city, Kae. The scene then shifts to Sarene’s home kingdom, Teod, for an
exciting climax. The last hundred pages
or so are constant action, but overall, I found Elantris to be a character-driven tale, and superbly done in that
respect. I did end up caring about what
happened to our three protagonists.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Caliginous(adj.)
: misty; dim; obscure; dark.

Others
: Revertiss(n.,
and a word Sanderson invented).

Excerpts...

Raoden shook his
head. “Galladon, that is just a tiny
part of it. No one accomplishes anything
in Elantris – they’re all either too busy squabbling over food or contemplating
their misery. The city needs a sense of
purpose.”

“That’s exactly
the problem. Everyone’s convinced that
their lives are over just because their hearts stopped beating.”

“That’s usually a
pretty good indication, sule,” Galladon said dryly.(pg. 123)

Roial chuckled,
and Sarene followed his gaze. Shuden and
Torena spun near the center of the dance floor, completely captivated by one
another.

“What are you
laughing about?” Sarene asked, watching the fire-haired girl and the young
Jindo.

“It is one of the
great joys of my old age to see young men proven hypocrites,” Roial said with
an evil smile. “After all those years
swearing that he would never let himself be caught – after endless balls spent
complaining when women fawned over him – his heart, and his mind, have turned
to mush as surely as any other man’s.”

“You’re a mean
old man, Your Grace.”

"And that is the
way it should be,” Roial informed. “Mean
young men are trivial, and kindly old men boring. Here, let me get us something to drink.”(pg. 398)

Prince Raoden of Arelon
awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all
eternity. (pg.
1, and the opening line in the book.)

The
quibbles are minor. The key to removing
the curse from Elantris seemed a bit less-than-epic, but at least it wasn’t the
banal “find
the Ultimate Artifact and deliver/destroy it” solution. I felt like there was a continuity issue with
one of the Elantrian gang leaders, Shaor.
She is identified as being Lord Telrii’s daughter on page 309, yet that
never factors into the storyline. Did the
author change his mind as to how to resolve her?

My
biggest quibble is with the number of loose threads the Brandon Sanderson
never ties up. Galladon’s hidden past
remains …well… hidden. The military
threat to the kingdom of Arelon is still there, not in the least bit diminished. Kiin and Eventeo have some interpersonal
issues to overcome And the question of
which sect - the Korathi or the Derethi – are blessed with the
theologically-correct interpretation of god, is definitely open for further
debate and bloodshed.

All
these loose ends scream to be resolved in a sequel, and according to Wikipedia,
Brandon Sanderson has promised one.
However, he followed up Elantris with
the fabulous Mistborn trilogy (reviewed
here, here, and here), and then got the task of finishing up the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. So he has been rather busy of late.

Still, one
can only hope that the sequel to Elantris
will eventually be written.

9 Stars. Subtract
½ star if you were hoping for a
hack-&-slash story. It’s there, but
you have to wait a while for it. It is
worth the wait.

It seems pretty obvious. The victim was killed by two shots to the back of the head. His hands
had been bound behind his back, and he’d been stuffed into the trunk of his
Rolls Royce prior to being executed. This
was clearly a case of trunk music (see excerpt, below, for what that is), a telltale sign that it
was a Mafia hit. It’s just a matter of figuring
out which city’s mob did the dirty deed, and who exactly pulled the trigger.

And
yet a couple of the minor details don’t quite make sense. For instance, whatever had been used to bind
or cuff the victim’s hands was removed after the slaying. So were his shoes. Why would a hitman do that?

Oh
well, whatever the reason, Detective Harry Bosch will figure it out in his
investigation. But tread carefully,
Harry. Sometimes the biggest obstacles
to solving a case aren’t the bad guys.

It’s your fellow law enforcement agents.

What’s To Like...

The action in Trunk
Music starts immediately. The
book opens with Harry Bosch arriving at the scene of the crime, and things
don’t slow down at all through the final page.
Harry divides his time between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and Michael
Connelly is obviously well-acquainted with these cities, as he gives detailed
descriptions of Harry’s wanderings through both.

The book was written in the 90’s, and it was
neat to see some of the nostalgia from that decade. American West Airlines is still in business,
although Harry prefers to fly Southwest.
You use a VCR to watch videos, a teletype machine to send documents,
and a “cellular phone” to call people. I
also liked Connelly’s tip-of-the-hat to the book “Stranger in a Strange Land”.

This is both a police procedural and a crime-thriller. The “whodunit” portion gets resolved at
around 70%, and then the book kicks into Action-Intrigue for the rest of the way. Plot twists abound; so do red herrings; and I
liked it that Harry could reach wrong conclusions at times. He can also be a bit of an a**hole, which is
kinda neat.

There’s a goodly amount of cussing, which would be expected in this type
of story; and some sex. The chapters are
long, and of uneven length. This is a
standalone story, although a couple characters, Eleanor Wish and Roy Lindell,
who appear in other books in the series, show up here. The Kindle version ends at 88%, with the rest
of the e-book devoted to a preview of the next book in the series.

Excerpts...

“You said he was
put in his trunk and capped twice, huh? . . . Bosch, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m
here. Yeah, capped twice in the trunk.”

“Trunk music.”

“What?”

“It’s a wise guy
saying outta Chicago. You know, when
they whack some poor slob they say, ‘Oh, Tony?
Don’t worry about Tony. He’s
trunk music now. You won’t see him no
more’” (loc. 394)

“Harry, you want
the swag on this?”

“Swag?”

“Scientific wild
ass guess.”(loc. 468)

Kindle Details...

Trunk Musicpresently sells for $6.99
at Amazon right now. The other books in
the series are all in the price range of
$4.99
to $9.99.

“Kenahepyou?” (loc. 588)

The quibbles are few. At one point, while searching a suspect’s
home, Harry discovers a potential murder weapon, sealed in a plastic bag,
hidden behind the toilet. He’s excited
because it’s another piece of evidence to tie the suspect to the crime. But I was thinking, “Harry! For cripes sake, the perp would never keep
something like that around. Someone
planted it there! Don’t even touch it!”

Also,
the ending, although suitably replete with excitement, felt a bit
contrived. There’s a lot riding on one
of Harry’s hunches, including a whole slew of cops. If Harry’s wrong, they’re gonna kick
themselves for not staking out other possible sites. Things work out of course, and Harry’s proven
right. But all the baddies get taken
care of in a manner that felt just a tad too convenient.

But hey, by then the plotline was Action-Intrigue, not Police
Procedural, and it made for a thrilling climax.
So I’m not complaining.

9 Stars.
For me, Trunk
Music was a great page-turner. My only question after finishing it was
whether or not all the “bending of the rules” that Harry (and some of his colleagues)
get away with really do occur in the real world. If so, it makes me wonder if we’re closer to
living in a police state than we realize.

Monday, January 2, 2017

Times are tough at the Mnemosyne Cincture, a
mining operation on one of Saturn’s moons.
The parent company, Bootstrap, Inc., is not pleased with the falling
profits, nor at the delays in getting the precious Bernalium ore from there to
Earth. Equipment keeps coming up missing,
and sabotage is suspected. Then there are the hallucinations that the younger
children claim to be seeing, which they’ve labeled the “Blue Dolls”.

But
something down there has attracted the attention of the TARDIS, and that means
that the police box that is not a police box, along with its passengers -
Doctor Who and his sidekicks, Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot - are about to be
transported there (and then), and get drawn
into all the strange events and politics.

Maybe our protagonists can straighten everything out there. Or maybe they’ll bring about the end of the
world.

What’s To Like...

Full disclosure: While I’m vaguely aware of
the (British)
television series “Doctor Who” and its cult
following, I’ve never watched an episode of it, and had no idea exactly what
the TARDIS was when I bought this book. It caught my eye
primarily because its author, Stephen Baxter, is one of my favorite sci-fi
writers.

The three protagonists – the Doc, Zoe, and
Jamie – are all well-developed and fun to meet. This
apparently is set in the “Doctor Who #2” timeline, which will mean something to
fans of the series. The pacing is brisk,
and the storyline sufficiently complex to keep my interest. The chapters are short and there are some
kewl “Interludes” interspersed throughout the book. Doctor Who –
Wheel of Ice is written in English, not American, and I'm always partial to that.

The
main storyline – the mystery surrounding the Blue Dolls – was engaging, although not
particularly twisty. Beyond that. there
were a couple of interrelated themes running
through the book. The first –
when is a species sentient enough to where we coexist with them instead of
eating them? – is fairly common for the sci-fi genre. But the other – does Artificial Sentience
have any inherent rights? – was a new (to me, at least) and fascinating concept.

The
ending is good enough, although I found it to be a bit too convenient when the
Ultimate Evil got her just desserts. I
liked the tip-of-the-hat to one of my favorite classics – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
I also enjoyed the catchphrases – “Resilience, Remembrance, Restoration”, “Community,
Identity, Stability”, and my personal favorite “It’s good to be a B!”

“Oh, Zoe, of
course it has. But if it wasn’t
disabled, don’t you think I’d have activated it by now?”

“Disabled!”

“I have been
meaning to get around to looking into it ...”(pg. 13)

Every day started
with a decision: which end of the makeshift colony’s shabby little recycling
plant to visit first. The plant was a
rough row of hoppers and processing machines, white boxes joined end to end by
pipes and ducts, all the components pinched by Sam and his cronies from
Utilities up on the Wheel. You did your
personal business at one end, and then let the engines process the waste,
extracting nutrients and adding Titan meltwater and tholin chemicals to flavour. And out the other end came breakfast, things
like biscuits that weren’t biscuits, bowls of stuff like mushroom soup that
wasn’t mushroom soup. It was a little
factory with a cludgie at one end and a soup dispenser at the other. Charming.(pg. 179)

“Isn’t this what life is for, granddad? Skiing on a moon of Saturn!” (pg. 91 )

Although
he did a creditable job in penning Doctor Who – The
Wheel of Ice, I don’t think anyone is going to call this Stephen Baxter’s
finest literary effort. This is not his
fault; it is inherent to the nature of the undertaking.

Overall,
the story reads like a television script.
Think of any episode from, say, one of the Star
Trek series. Fun, entertaining, but hardly
epic. And the makers of the Doctor Who series certainly would want nothing that would
outshine their BBC series. So perhaps these sort of constraints were imposed upon Stephen Baxter going into the
project. I felt the same thing when I
recently watched the “Rogue One” Star Wars movie. It was enjoyable, but I felt like it was
taking care not to steal the spotlight from Episodes 1-7.

This is not a complaint. I came away with a better understanding of
the Doctor Who cosmos, and DW-TWoI kept my
interest from beginning to end. But it
can’t compare to some of Baxter’s major novels, such as Evolution or the Manifold
trilogy.

8 Stars. Add 1 Star
if you’re already familiar with the Doctor Who universe. And even if, like me, you’re a Doctor Who
newbie, it's a nice way to learn the basics of the series.